Nvidia Begins to Include GeForce 6-Series Support into Drivers

Nvidia Corp.’s latest beta drivers include support of what can possibly the company’s next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) made using 28nm process technology. The actual chips are projected to officially emerge next year, but Nvidia may easily be tailoring its software for the new hardware.

The latest unreleased Nvidia ForceWare 285-series drivers contain mentioning of GeForce 610M and GeForce GT 630M graphics adapters for notebooks, according to a news-story by VR-Zone web-site. It is believed that the new GPUs belong to GK100-series chips that are based on the code-named Kepler micro-architecture.

Nvidia said earlier this year that it plans to test-drive its next-generation Kepler graphics processing unit (GPU) this year and introduce the new chips commercially in 2012.

Kepler is Nvidia's next-generation graphics processor architecture that is projected to bring considerable performance improvements and will likely make the GPU more flexible in terms of programmability, which will speed up development of applications that take advantage of GPGPU (general purpose processing on GPU) technologies. Some of the technologies that Nvidia promised to introduce in Kepler and Maxwell (the architecture that will succeed Kepler) include virtual memory space (which will allow CPUs and GPUs to use the "unified" virtual memory), pre-emption, enhance the ability of GPU to autonomously process the data without the help of CPU and so on. Entry-level chips may not get all the features that Kepler architecture will have to often.

"[Our experience with 28nm] is looking really good, it is looking much better than our experience with 40nm. It is just a comprehensive, across-the-board engagement between TSMC and ourselves making sure that we are ready for production ramp when the time comes. So I feel really good about 28nm," said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia.